The following content is generally available worldwide, except where otherwise noted. All TV shows listed are for networks and streaming services based in the United States. All movies listed are those released in U.S. cinemas. This schedule is for content and events premiering this week and does not include content that has already been made available.
March 24 – March 30, 2025
TV/Streaming Services
All times listed are Eastern Time/Pacific Time, unless otherwise noted.
Investigation Discovery’s new documentary series “Hollywood Demons” premieres on Monday, March 24 at 9.m. ET/PT.
Release date: Wednesday, March 19 in select theaters; Friday, March 28, on digital and VOD.
Synopsis from Greenwich Entertainment:
The shocking story of Aum Shinrikyo, the doomsday cult that unleashed a deadly nerve gas in Tokyo’s subway system in 1995. Founded by disillusioned yoga teacher Shoko Asahara, Aum transformed into a terrorist organization while Japan’s police and media turned a blind eye. Featuring rare archival footage and an interview with one of Asahara’s former high-ranking disciples.
Radio/Podcasts
No new true crime podcast series debuting this week.
Events
Events listed here are not considered endorsements by this website. All ticket buyers with questions or concerns about the event should contact the event promoter or ticket seller directly.
All start times listed are local time, unless otherwise noted.
A late 2010s photo of the Franke family in “Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke.” Pictured from left to right: Chad Franke, an unidentified daughter, Ruby Franke, an unidentified daughter, Kevin Franke, and unidentified daughter and Shari Franke. (Photo courtesy of Hulu)
Culture Representation: The three-episode documentary “Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke” features an all-white group ofpeople talking about the child-abuse scandal involving former YouTube family influencer Ruby Franke and her business partner Jodi Hildebrant, who are both from Utah.
Culture Clash: In 2024, Franke and Hildebrandt were both convicted of felony child abuse for beating, torturing, starving and holding captive Franke’s two youngest children.
Culture Audience: “Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in watching true crime documentaries about child abusers who are punished for their crimes and how family vlogging can have a dark side.
Chad Franke in “Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke” (Photo by Kai Pfaffenbach/Disney/Hulu)
Kevin Franke in “Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke” (Photo by Kai Pfaffenbach/Disney/Hulu)
Shari Franke in “Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke” (Photo by Kai Pfaffenbach/Disney/Hulu)
The three-episode docuseries “Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke” is an insightful but still not completely comprehensive chronicle of one of the most horrific crime cases involving a family of YouTube vloggers. It’s an above-average documentary about this high-profile criminal scandal because this docuseries has interviews with Ruby Franke’s ex-husband Kevin and their eldest children Shari and Chad. However, the series needed more details about Jodi Hildebrandt, Ruby’s business partner who was also convicted of the same child-abuse felony crimes. In February 2024, Hildebrandt and Ruby were each sentenced to up to 30 years in prison.
Directed by Olly Lambert, “Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke” does not reveal the names and faces of Ruby and Kevin’s four youngest of the ex-couple’s six children, in order to protect the children’s identities. That’s because these four children were still under the age of 18 when this documentary series was released. At the time this documentary was released, Kevin was fighting to get custody of these four children, who were placed in foster care after Ruby was arrested. This custody case is sealed in juvenile court, which means more details about this custody battle are not available to the public.
Episode 1, which is titled “Abundance,” chronicles the happy years of the Franke family, particularly in the early years of the Franke family’s YouTube fame. Episode 2, titled “Distortion,” is about the family’s fall from YouTube grace and the mutual obsession that developed between Ruby and Hildebrandt when went into business with each other and eventually lived together. Episode 3, titled “Truth,” shows how the child abuse was eventually exposed and how Ruby and Hildebrandt were brought to justice. The documentary could have been better in providing the exact years in timeline captions, instead of “six months later” or “one year later.”
“Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke” begins with the same home security camera footage that many documentaries and video news reports about this scandal have used in the opening scene: Ruby and Kevin’s second-youngest child (who was 12 years old at the time) is shown walking up to a neighbor’s house in Ivins, Utah, on August 20, 2023. The boy is emaciated when he approaches the front door.
The people inside the house don’t open the door right away. Just as the boy is walking away, the house owner (an unidentified elderly man, whose face is not shown) opens the door and asks the boy how he can help him. The boy asks to be taken to the nearest jail. The concerned neighbor sees that the boy is skeletal, is covered in bruises, and has duct tape bindings on his legs and wrists that have cut through the skin.
The neighbor asks the boy to sit down on a front porch bench. As the man sits near the boy, he calls 911 (the call is played alongside the footage), and he chokes up in tears when he describes the boy in distress. An unidentified woman, who is presumably the man’s wife, is shown pacing nervously after she gives the boy something to eat and drink. Her face is also blurred out to protect her privacy.
This haunting footage is what the world now knows as the boy’s escape from Hildebrandt’s sprawling compound, where he and his younger sister were held captive and tortured by their mother Ruby and Hildebrandt. His escape from the compound led to the arrest of Ruby and Hildebrandt. Ruby and Kevin’s two middle children (both teenage girls) were found unharmed at the home of a friend of Ruby. This friend (who is unidentified and not interviewed in the documentary) had been asked by Ruby to pick up the girls from school.
And where was Kevin, the children’s father? Kevin and Ruby had been separated for about a year, and he had not seen any of his kids during that time. Under the orders of Ruby and Hildebrandt, Kevin was forbidden to have contact with Ruby and the children during this separation. On the day that his Ruby and Hildebrandt were arrested for child abuse, Kevin was questioned by police and was cleared of any wrongdoing in this child abuse. He filed for divorced from Ruby in November 2023.
Why were Ruby and Kevin separated at the time Ruby was arrested in August 2023? According to Kevin, Hildebrandt (a psychotherapist) had brainwashed him and Jodi into thinking that Kevin was a bad husband. Hildebrandt, a divorcée with adult children, had a life coach business called Connexions, which marketed itself on YouTube and other social media platforms. Several people in the documentary describe Hildebrandt as a man-hating manipulator who encouraged an alarming number of her married clients to break up.
But there were problems in Chad and Ruby’s marriage long before Ruby met Hildebrandt. Ruby and Kevin, who are both Mormon, had been become immersed in an increasingly paranoid religious mindset, after the family’s YouTube vlogging business imploded because of public backlash and criticism that Ruby was being abusive to their children. Through interviews with Kevin, Shari, and Chad, as well as friends and neighbors of the Franke family and a few law-enforcement officials, the documentary unpeels the layers to show how this YouTube-famous family fell apart and became an example of sickening child abuse that takes place behind closed doors. (Not surprisingly, Ruby and Hildebrandt declined to be interviewed for the documentary.)
Ruby (who was a homemaker), Kevin (who worked as a professor) and their kids lived in a middle-class house in Springville, Utah. People in the documentary describe Springville as a great place to live, but Springville and other predominantly Mormon communities have a culture that is fixated on perfectionism. The Frankes used to have a happy family when their lives first went on display on YouTube. According to Kevin, Ruby was the one who came up with the idea to document their family life on their own YouTube channel, which launched in 2015 and was called 8 Passengers.
The 8 Passengers channel has since been removed from YouTube, which has banned Ruby and Hildebrandt for life. However, the filmmakers of this documentary had access to more than 1,000 hours of Franke family home videos, many of them unaired. And some of this previously unseen footage shows that Ruby often put up a front of being a “nice mother” on camera, but she could be bad-tempered and sometimes cruel in footage that she said would be edited out and not made public.
At the height of the popularity of 8 Passengers, the channel had about 2.5 million subscribers. At first, the 8 Passengers channel was lighthearted and fun. On camera, the family’s squabbles were minimal and handled in a loving and caring way. But over time, Ruby showed more impatience and anger toward her kids. Chad and Shari say they and their siblings eventually resented having to “perform” and fake their emotions on camera.
The documentary has a clip from the channel’s very first video, which shows Ruby, who was pregnant at the time with her sixth child, doing a gender reveal for the baby, by cutting a cake in front of her other five children. Ruby says that if the cake is blue inside, the baby will be a boy. If the cake is pink inside, the baby will be a girl. The gender revealed showed that the baby would be a girl. Shari looks elated. Chad looks disappointed.
In the documentary, Kevin describes his quick courtship of Ruby as something that involved some manipulation and deception on his part. They met in their late teens in August 2000. Kevin says there were about three or four other guys he had to compete with to date Ruby. In Ruby’s home, Kevin found a chart where Ruby had listed all the attributes she wanted in a future husband. His name and the names of the rival suitors were listed on the chart.
Kevin saw that he didn’t have enough boxes checked under his name for the ideal husband attributes. He decided that he would reinvent himself for Ruby, so that he could check all the boxes on that chart. This tactic worked. By October 2000, just two months after they met, Kevin and Ruby were engaged. They got married in December 2000.
Kevin explains his relationship with Ruby this way: “She really wanted me to be the perfect husband, the even-keeled but strong patriarch of the family. But I wasn’t. I am a nerd, through and through. I was very insecure with who I was. And I was willing to change to become somebody that somebody else would appreciate and love.” He adds, “Once I had it, I was willing to do anything to keep it.”
Kevin admits that although he wasn’t entirely comfortable on camera, he was definitely comfortable with the money that started to pour in from the family’s YouTube business. Kevin says that the payments grew from $85 for the first payment and over the years peaked at about $100,000 per month, largely due to sponsorship deals. Kevin describes Ruby as the CEO of the family business and everyone else in the family was an employee.
The Franke family became famous on YouTube in a way that endeared them to many of their fans but alienated them from some other people. Some of the neighbors interviewed for this documentary describe Ruby as too caught up in being a YouTube star—to the point where she had a video camera filming her almost every time she was went out in public, and neighbors were sometimes filmed without their consent. Ruby is also described as someone who wasn’t very friendly or sociable when she wasn’t on camera.
Chad became a breakout heartthrob star on the channel because much of the audience consisted of girls his age. But eventually all that attention didn’t matter enough to him because he was especially resentful of Ruby telling him how to act on camera, and he started to rebel. The documentary has a previously unaired clip of angry Ruby giving this stern order to Chad: “Fake being happy.”
Over time, Chad began to not pay attention to authority figures, and he got expelled from school. Ruby’s friend Paige Hanna, who’s interviewed in the documentary, introduced Ruby to Hildebrandt as someone who could possibly help Chad through counseling. Hanna was also a member of Connexions and expresses regret about introducing Hildebrandt to Ruby and being fooled into thinking that Hildebrandt was doing God’s work.
By all accounts, Hildebrandt was the ignition match to a proverbial powder keg in the Franke family that was ready to explode. Ruby and Hildebrandt believed in a “tough love” form of parenting where spankings and other corporal punishment were not only considered acceptable but also necessary for parents to discipline their children. In an archival video, Hildebrandt is shown saying that children do not have a right to privacy. Ruby enthusiastically agreed with Hildebrandt.
One of Chad’s punishments at home was to have his bed privileges taken away. He had to sleep on a bean bag for seven months. When Chad let this information slip in an 8 Passengers video, it sparked immense outrage from the public. The 8 Passengers channel saw a steep decline in viewers and sponsors. Ruby eventually shut down the channel for good in 2022.
That same year, Ruby and Hildebrandt started a support group together called Moms of Truth, which was marketed on social media platforms and was really a way for Connexions to get more members. Many concerned members of the public called for Child Protective Services to investigate Ruby. Some people in the general public predicted that Ruby would end up in a true crime documentary about child abuse.
It’s mentioned in the documentary that an attorney advised Ruby to make a public apology video about the beanbag backlash. Ruby refused and instead doubled down on the idea that her kids needed more discipline, not less. Her two youngest children kids were eventually homeschooled. Later, Ruby began to have even more disturbing ideas about the kids. In her journals that were found by police after Ruby’s arrest in August 2023, she described her children as demons who needed to be punished.
Chad describes the moment he knew that his mother got hooked on Hildebrandt. He says it was when he had a videoconference call with Hildebrandt, which was the first time that he met her for a therapy session. Ruby was also in the room with him. When Hildebrandt asked Chad if he was ready to start living a responsible life, Chad says he enthusiastically replied, “Yes.”
But Hildebrandt’s response was to stare at Chad and declare, “You’re lying, Chad.” Chad says that Hildebrandt was correct: He had been faking this response. And he noticed that his mother had an expression on her face that indicated that Ruby looked both smug and in awe that Hildebrandt could see through Chad’s fakery, and now Ruby had an ally in disciplining her kids.
In the documentary, Hildebrandt is described as a cult leader who yielded a lot of power and influence over her admirers and supporters. At one point, Hildebrandt convinced Ruby and Kevin that Hildebrandt should be their in-house marriage counselor. In 2021, Hildebrandt moved into the Franke home. Hildebrandt also said that she was afraid to live in her house in Ivins (which is about a four-hour drive from Springville) because Hildebrandt claimed that the devil was after her at her house in Ivins.
According to Kevin, things got weird after Hildebrandt moved into the Franke home: Hildebrant said that the devil was possessing her. The documentary has some bizarre home video footage of Hildebrandt appearing to be in a trance and speaking in a husky voice, as if she’s possessed. Ruby and Kevin separated in 2022, after Hildebrandt moved into the spouses’ home. After Kevin moved out of the house, Hildebrandt convinced Jodi and her four youngest children to live with Hildebrandt in Ivins.
Shari says that long before Hildebrandt weaseled her way into the Franke family’s lives, it was not unusual for Ruby to physically abuse the children, especially Chad. Shari gives this harrowing description in the documentary: “He got beat really bad one time. And I helped him clean blood off the walls.” In Shari’s 2025 memoir “The House of My Mother: A Daughter’s Quest for Freedom,” Shari says that she didn’t report any of the abuse that happened in the household because she feared that she wouldn’t be believed and thought at the time that this was “normal” punishment for children.
Chad and Shari, who describe each other as being each other’s best friend since childhood, eventually were disowned by Ruby and Kevin when Chad and Shari were in their late teens. Chad still clung to Hildebrandt’s counseling, because he says he was brainwashed until after Ruby was arrested. By contrast, Shari wasn’t fooled and knew that Hildebrandt and Ruby were menacing dangers to her younger siblings.
Shari says in the beginning of the documentary: “What Ruby has done has crossed the line from abusive to psychotic to full-on evil.” After Ruby and Kevin separated, Shari was a student at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah (which is about seven miles northwest of Springville) and heard from neighbors that her four siblings who were living with Ruby were often left home alone for hours, sometimes days, at the house in Springville.
Shari called authorities to do a welfare check on her younger siblings because her parents had forbidden her to be at the house, and she wasn’t on speaking terms with Ruby and Kevin. Neighbors also called the authorities to check on the kids. But unfortunately, every time the police showed up to the Franke family house to respond to these reports, no one answered the door, and the police couldn’t go inside without a warrant and without any witness accounts of abuse.
Many of the Springville residents interviewed in the documentary are married couples who knew the Franke family and describe Springville as an idyllic place to live: Jared Condie and Sydney Condie; Grant Collard and Kristin Collard; Matthew McClean and Lisa McClean; and Ruel Haymond and Tresa Haymond. Lisa tearfully says although she never personally saw the Franke kids being abuse, she regrets not telling the police a lie by claiming to be a witness to abuse, in order for the police to go into the Franke house in Springville and rescue the Franke kids who were being neglected.
Other people interviewed in the documentary are Sgt. Nick Tobler and Det. Jessica Bate, both of the Santa Clara-Ivins Police Department in Utah. They were two of the law enforcement officials who were at the crime scene when police searched Hildebrandt’s compound after the 12-year-old Franke son fled to get help. Tobler was the one who found Jody and Kevin’s youngest child starving and terrified in the house. Tobler and Bate also were part of the investigation, including interviewing Jodi and Hildebrandt after both women were arrested.
In the aftermath of this terrible abuse, Shari says that she has no interest in ever seeing or talking to Ruby again. Chad doesn’t say whether or not he will cut off contact with Ruby for the rest of his life. However, Chad does firmly say that Ruby should be not be let out of prison until all of his siblings are at least 18 years old.
Kevin is the one person in the documentary who seems to be the most willing to forgive Ruby. He willingly admits that he still loves her. And he says that many of his decisions and mistakes were based on putting his marriage above the needs of his children. Kevin seems remorseful but not apologetic. If he made any apologies to his children, those apologies are not in the documentary.
“Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke” has the benefit of interviews with three members of the Franke family who knew Ruby best. However, the documentary doesn’t answer some questions, such as: “Where were the children’s grandparents or other family members?” “Did any of the neighbors ask the kids if the kids needed help?” And “If this family was so religious, how come their church did not get involved?”
The documentary also has voids when it comes to information about Hildebrant’s personal background. The only Hildebrant associate who’s interviewed in the documentary is Brannon Patrick, who’s described as a local therapist who trained with Hildebrandt for more than a year. Patrick says that he became disillusioned with Hildebrandt (who had her license suspended at least once for revealing confidential patient information) after he saw that she was more interested in fame and money than in helping people.
Jessi Hildebrandt, a nonbinary adult whose father is Jodi Hildebrandt’s brother, has given interviews saying that Jodi physically and mentally abused Jessi when Jessi was a teenager and young adult. The documentary should have had more insight into Jodi Hildebrandt’s past to explain how she ended up being such a terribly abusive person. There is also no information about what her children think about her.
As it stands, “Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke” still does a very good job of showing what happened in this notorious crime case. The documentary is not a condemnation of people who choose to document their lives (at least what they want to show on camera) for the whole world to see. Instead, the documentary can serve as an urgent warning to not believe everything on the Internet and to pay more attention to families who might need help in the real world.
Hulu premiered “Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke” on February 27, 2025.
Culture Representation: The documentary film “AUM: The Cult at the End of the World” features a predominantly Japanese group of people (with some white people) talking about the Aum Shinrikyo cult, based in Japan and led by Shoko Asahara.
Culture Clash:Aum Shinrikyo started in 1983 as a yoga/meditation group, but by 1995, several members of the cult were convicted of murdering others for cult-motivated reasons.
Culture Audience: “AUM: The Cult at the End of the World” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in finding out more about a sinister cult that might not be well-known outside of Japan.
Shoko Asahara (fourth from left) in “AUM: The Cult at the End of the World” (Photo courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment)
“AUM: The Cult at the End of the World” is an expected cautionary tale about a group that started out as harmless and turned into a dangerous and deadly cult. This grim and somewhat tedious documentary adequately tells the disturbing story about the Aum Shinriko cult but doesn’t give much new information. It would be a better documentary with tighter editing and more original investigations from the filmmakers.
Directed by Ben Braun and Chiaki Yanagimoto, “AUM: The Cult at the End of the World” is their feature-film directorial debut. “AUM: The Cult at the End of the World” had its world premiere at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. The documentary sticks to a standard formula of mixing archival footage with interviews that were done exclusively for the documentary. “AUM: The Cult at the End of the World” is at least partially based on the 1996 non-fiction book “The Cult at the End of the World,” written by David E. Kaplan and Andrew Marshall, who are both interviewed in the documentary.
The Aum Shinriko cult was launched in Japan in 1983, by a self-proclaimed guru named Shoko Asahara, whose birth name was Chizuo Matsumoto. The group’s purpose was originally yoga and meditation. The group began calling itself Aum Shinriko in 1987. Aum Shinriko attracted mostly young people and lived in communes. The group eventually bought land in a remote town near Mount Fuji called Kamikuishiki in 1989, when Aum Shinriko had about 3,000 followers.
As far as cults go, Aum Shinriko checked a lot of boxes because this was yet another cult that isolated its members in a remote area, where the members were supposed to live in a commune-like setting. Asahara encouraged members to have a lack of sleep, lack of food, and lack of personal hygiene. Over time, Asahara began to make wild claims about himself and the cult, such as saying that joining the cult would give people superpowers.
“The Cult at the End of the World” co-author Marshall is a London-born journalist who lived in Japan and was a deputy editor at Tokyo Journal in the late 1980s. In the documentary, Marshall describes the cult’s living quarters as looking like a cross between “factories and prison camps.” And although the cult was in a rural area, the cult members were disruptive enough to be considered “bad neighbors” because the cult members would chant loudly during all hours of the day and night. The cult also would leave a lot of garbage strewn around.
In other words, Aum Shinriko was a cult that did not keep a low profile. Aum Shinriko also had books and graphic novels to promote the cult. Cult leader Asahara sought out publicity and often gave media interviews. Asahara called himself a messiah and the reincarnation of Buddha. He was also preaching doomsday prophecies and had bold political ambitions for himself and his cult.
A turning point for Aum Shinriko was in 1990, when the cult formed its own political group. Asahara and 24 other members of the cult were political candidates for Japan’s House of Representatives, but these cult members lost in all of these elections. This humiliating defeat apparently set Asahara over the edge. Instead of wanting to join the Japanese government, the group changed its agenda to wanting to destroy the Japanese government.
By 1991, after Russia switched from a Communist regime to a democratic-resembling government, members of Aum Shinriko went to Russia to recruit new members. Aum Shinriko also began to amass weapons and illegally purchased nerve gas called Sarin. What started out as a seemingly benign lifestyle community had turned into a full-fledged terrorist group.
“AUM: The Cult at the End of the World” begins with Aum Shinriko’s most notorious crime: On March 20, 1995, Aum Shinriko instigated a Sarin attack on five subway cars on a subway train going to Kasumigaseki Station in Tokyo. The attack murdered 13 people and injured thousands.
Asahara was arrested on May 16, 1995. By October of 1995, Aum Shinriko disbanded. Asahara and several Aum Shinriko members were eventually convicted of murder. Asahara was sentenced to death in 2004. He and other convicted Aum Shinriko murderers were executed in 2018. All of this information is dutifully chronicled in the documentary.
“AUM: The Cult at the End of the World” also takes a closer look beyond the 1995 nerve gas attack and examines the human toll taken on people who went up against the cult. People tried to get loved ones out of the cult but did not get much help from authorities because the people in the cult were considered adults who were there of their own free will. Journalists, lawyers and other people who were investigating the cult found themselves on the receiving end of harassment or worse from cult members.
Although it’s impossible to know how many murders are linked to Aum Shinriko, the documentary mentions three particular murders that are definitely linked to Aum Shinriko. A Yokohama-based attorney named Tsutsumi Sakamoto represented family members who wanted their loved ones to leave the cult. Sakamoto was investigating the cult when he, his wife and their son disappeared in 1989. An Aum Shinriko badge was found in the family’s apartment. Their murdered bodies were found in 1995, after an Aum Shinriko member provided authorities with a map to find the bodies.
“AUM: The Cult at the End of the World” has an interview with a former member named Mika Hosokawa, who joined the cult in 1988, when she was 22 years old. At this time in her life, she describes herself as “spiritually stalled” and looking for a change in her life. Married couple Hiroyuki Nagaoka and Eiko Nagaoka say in documentary interviews that they spent a fortune trying to get their unnamed son out of the cult. They describe their son as being lured into Aum Shinriko by the cult’s book “How to Develop Psychic Powers.”
One of the most compelling interviews intthe documentary is with Fumihiro Joyu, who was a high-ranking member of the Aum Shinriko cult. Joyu spent time in prison for his Aum Shinriko crimes and was released in 1999. He currently leads a group called Hikari no Wa, which is Japanese for Circle of Light.
Joyu says that his father abandoned him as a child. And when Joyu was in the cult, he says that Asahara became a “real father” to Joyu, who joined the cult in 1986. At the time, the cult was still presenting itself as a yoga/meditation school. Joyu majored in artificial intelligence in college. He was interested in yoga and spiritual enlightenment. And he says that in Japan, there was an “occult boom” at the time.
According to Joyu, the hierarchy in the Aum Shinriko cult was that cult members who were scientists, chemists and engineers were on the second-highest level of the hierarchy and were treated like priests. It explains why this cult used chemical warfare for its heinous subway attack in 1995. At the time Joyu joined the group, he worked at JAYA, which is a Japanese outer-space agency that is similar to NASA.
Joyu doesn’t seem particularly remorseful about all the destruction caused by Aum Shinriko. He tells his story matter-of-factly. And he clearly has fond memories of his time in the cult. The documentary could have done a better job of asking Joyu about his thoughts about the people who were harmed by the cult, or at least asked him what he thinks about cult warning signs that people need to know about to avoid a cult such as Aum Shinriko.
The documentary’s most heart-wrenching interview is with Yoshiyuki Kono, who was falsely accused in the Japanese media of being the perpetrator of the Mastumoto subway attack in 1995. During this ordeal, his wife went into a coma for 14 years after having a heart attack. Even after experiencing all this trauma, Kono says, “I’ve come to realize that even in the toughest of circumstances, you can look for joy in life.”
Other people interviewed in “AUM: The Cult at the End of the World” are journalist Shoko Egawa; attorneys Yuji Nakamura and Taro Takmoto; and Seiich Takeuchi, a Kamikuishiki villager who took photos of the cult members. Takeuchi gives his opinion on why the Aum Shinriko had a reign of terror for so many years: “I think the [government] administration and the police are responsible for it. So many red flags, and they barely investigated them.”
“AUM: The Cult at the End of the World” does what a lot of documentaries do when they are satisfactory but not outstanding: They rely heavily on reports that journalists have already done and sometimes interview those journalists. This documentary is obviously very well-researched. But more insight probably would’ve been in this movie if the people interviewed for the documentary were asked more probing questions beyond the basics.
Greenwich Entertainment released “AUM: The Cult at the End of the World” in select U.S. cinemas on March 19, 2025. The movie will be released on digital and VOD on March 28, 2025.
Culture Representation: Taking place in New York state, from 1957 to the early 1970s, the dramatic film “The Alto Knights” (based on real events) features an all-white group of people representing the working-class, middle-class and criminal underground.
Culture Clash: Frank Costello and Vito Genovese are former best friends who become rivals for power in New York’s Mafia community.
Culture Audience: “The Alto Knights” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of the movie’s headliners and Mafia movies and don’t mind watching a derivative Mafia movie that overloads on tedious clichés.
Debra Messing in “The Alto Knights” (Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures)
Robert De Niro portraying Mafia bosses Frank Costello and Vito Genovese is a gimmick in “The Alto Knights” that quickly gets old. The mindless screenplay and bad editing make this botched drama seem like a dull parody. “The Alto Knights” is the Mafia movie equivalent of a past-his-prime Elvis Presley impersonator struggling to look entertaining in a tacky lounge where hardly anyone cares to show up.
Directed by Barry Levinson and written by Nicholas Pileggi, “The Alto Knights” had the potential to be a much better movie that the boring slog it turned out to be. In addition to having a talented cast, “The Alto Knights” has the filmmakers who’ve made some mobster movie classics. Levinson directed 1991’s “Bugsy” about Bugsy Siegel. Pileggi wrote 1990’s “Goodfellas” and 1995’s “Casino,” which both starred De Niro. Both those past glories don’t always guarantee that every movie they make will be just as good or better.
In “The Alto Knights” (which takes place mostly in New York state, from 1957 to the early 1970s), the story is told from the perspective of elderly Frank Costello, who narrates the movie as he looks back on his life. Costello died in 1973, at the age of 82. (For the purposes of this review, the real people are referred to by their last names, while the characters in the movie are referred to by their first names.)
When Frank looks back on his life in “Alto Knights,” he literally looks back on his life. He looks at old photos in a slide show. It’s supposed to make him look adorably quaint. But the story’s jumbled narrative just makes Frank look like a rambling codger.
“The Alto Knights” begins in 1957, when Frank gets shot in an elevator of his Central Park West apartment in Manhattan. The shooter is a nervous Mafia lunkhead named Vincent Gigante (played by Cosmo Jarvis), a 35-year-old “enforcer,” who spends most his screen time getting berated for bungling the jobs that he’s assigned. “The Alto Knights” goes on a repeat loop of the same types of arguments and conflicts happening, like terrible movies do when they want to fill up time and don’t have anything interesting or clever to show or say.
In an example of the movie’s corny dialogue, Vincent utters this line as he shoots Frank in the head: “This one’s for you, Frank.” Vincent and Frank are the only two people in the elevator during the shooting, so it’s more than ridiculous for Vincent to state the obvious about where he wants his bullet to go. And keep in mind: This is supposed to be a brutal Mafia assassination. The assassin shouldn’t be saying something that sounds like a song dedication in some sort of Rat Pack sing-along with Frank Sinatra.
Frank is shot in the head and is quickly taken to a hospital, where his loyal wife Bobbie Costello (played by Debra Messing) rushes to be by Frank’s side. Bobbie is a stereotypical “don’t ask, don’t tell” shallow Mafia wife who mostly cares about having enough money to spend on the affluent lifestyle that she wants, rather than caring about all the crimes her husband commits to get this money. Bobbie has some of the worst scenes in the movie.
Luckily for Frank, Vincent’s bullet only grazed Frank’s scalp and curved around the back of Frank’s head. It doesn’t take long before Frank finds out that his former best friend/current worst enemy Vito Genovese ordered this murder hit on Frank. In the movie, Frank gives a disjointed explanation for how and why it all went wrong between him and Vito. In some flashback scenes and photos, Luke Stanton Eddy plays Frank in his 20s, and Antonio Cipriano plays Vito in his 20s.
Frank and Vito were working-class best friends who came up in the Mafia crime scene together on the tough streets of New York City. Frank is calm and logical. Vito is bad-tempered and unstable. Frank cares about being accepted into the elite upper crust of society. Vito doesn’t have those ambitions. It’s very much an “opposites attract” friendship.
As for the De Niro playing these two characters, “The Alto Knights” (especially in scenes where Frank and Vito are talking to each other) can only highlight that De Niro just does only slightly different versions of Mafia characters he’s played in many other films. De Niro gives bespectacled Vito more manic energy and a slightly higher voice than Frank, but De Niro slips back into familiar mannerisms that he’s done many times before in movies like “Goodfellas,” “Casino” or 2019’s “The Irishman.” The makeup in “The Alto Knights” is adequate and won’t be nominated for major awards.
Vito and Frank worked with the Luciano crime family (founded by Lucky Luciano) and made a fortune in bootlegging alcohol during the Prohibition era. They liked to hang out at a social club called The Alto Knights, which is not prominently featured in the movie, even though the movie is named after this place. Vito eventually became the boss of the Luciano family.
But when Vito left the United States to hide out in Italy, World War II happened, and Vito was stuck in Italy for several years. During his absence, Frank was named the head of the Luciano family. Frank brags in hindsight, “Suddenly, I was the boss of bosses.” In 1945, the year that World War II ended, Vito returned to the United States and wanted his former job back as boss of the Luciano family.
However, Frank doesn’t want to give up this power. In the narration, Frank says that Vito is too volatile to be an effective crime boss. But, as Frank says in the movie, another big reason why Frank doesn’t want to hand over control to Vito is because Frank has gotten accustomed to the money, power attention that he gets for being the boss of the Luciano family. You can easily guess how else this movie is going to go with this back-and-forth power struggle.
“The Alto Knights” becomes bloated with pointless scenes and cringeworthy Mafia stereotypes. In other Mafia movies, the bosses are usually portrayed as cunning and ruthless enough to evade capture for years. In “The Alto Knights,” the bosses evade capture simply through bribery or dumb luck.
Scenes that take place at a congressional hearing or at a courtroom trial should’ve crackled with edgy intensity and tension. Instead, these scenes lumber along and have all the suspense of someone reading a phone book. These scenes are just excuses for De Niro to mug for the camera while delivering mundane lines.
One of the movie’s many cringeworthy scenes is when several Mafia members gather for a barbecue somewhere in the rural Appalachian region of New York state, and they find out that they’re being spied on by New York State Police. Frank says in an observational voiceover that Mafia people run as soon as they hear the word “cop.” And right on cue, the Mafia guys are seen running like scattered cockroaches to their cars to leave, even though there’s nowhere they can really escape to in this remote area that has a one-lane road.
And sure enough, the Mafia guys are stopped on the road, rounded up by police, and questioned by police on the road. A key Mafia member (who won’t be named in this review) narrowly misses this roundup because he was late to the barbecue. When he and his driver drive past the ruckus on the road, they see many of their colleagues being questioned by police. Even though it’s obvious that a major raid is taking place, the dimwit driver repeatedly wonders out loud what’s going on, as his boss is slow to figure it out too.
In other words, the stupidity in “The Alto Knights” knows no bounds. In 1957, when Mafia heavyweight Albert Anastasia (played by Michael Rispoli) is gunned down and murdered in a barber shop, Bobbie absurdly expresses shock that Mafia people can get killed during the day in public. At the funeral, Bobbie comments to Albert’s widow Elsa Anastasia (played by Jean Zarzour) about Albert’s murder: “Who would’ve thought in broad daylight? In a barber shop! You’ve got to be brave. Be brave!”
Vito’s wife Anna Genovese (played by Kathrine Narducci) doesn’t have enough of a personality to make a difference to this awful movie. Other characters come and go. A better-written film would’ve told the movie from the perspectives of the feuding Vito and Frank. Instead, “The Alto Knights” is just a one-sided, droning narrative from Frank, whose reminiscing about his ferocious Mafia heyday is less likely to terrify and more likely to put people to sleep.
Warner Bros. Pictures released “The Alto Knights” in U.S. cinemas on March 21, 2025.
Culture Representation: Taking place in Hong Kong, from 2010 to 2014 (with flashbacks to previous years), the dramatic film “Papa” (inspired by true events) features an all-Asian group of people representing the working-class and middle-class.
Culture Clash: A father struggles with guilt and depression after his teenage son murders the father’s wife and daughter.
Culture Audience: “Papa” will appeal primarily to people who can handle watching tearjerking dramas about families affected by murder.
Sean Lau, Lainey Hung, Dylan So and Jo Koo in “Papa” (Photo courtesy of Illume Films)
“Papa” is a beautifully filmed and heart-wrenching drama about a widower coping with his son murdering the father’s wife and daughter. Some viewers won’t like the timeline jumping, but this drama is an impactful portrait of grief and mental illness. At least half of the movie consists of flashbacks to the years before the family was ripped apart by this tragedy.
Written and directed by Philip Yung, “Papa” has a “present-day” storyline that takes place from 2010 to 2014. The flashbacks go back to the 1990s and continue through 2009. “Papa” is based on the real-life Heung Wo Street murder, which happened in July 2010, on Heung Wo Street in Tsuen Wan, Hong Kong. A 15-year-old boy named Kan Ka-leung murdered his mother Lam Lin-kam and his 12-year-old sister Kan Chung-yue, by hacking them to death with a cleaver at ther family’s apartment home, while his father Kan Fuk-kui was working the night shift at the family’s diner across the street.
Ka-leung immediately confessed to the crime when he made a 999 phone call to get help. He was later diagnosed with having schizophrenia because he said he heard voices telling him to murder because the world was overpopulated. In his mind, he was helping the environment by reducing the population with these murders. In 2012, after a trial where Ka-leung entered a not guilty plea due to insanity, he was sentenced to live in a psychiatric hospital, where he received treatment and was eventually considered well enough to be released from criminal containment.
“Papa” includes these facts in the story but changes the names of the family members and takes a speculative interior look at the father’s state of mind as he goes through the grieving process. Just like what happened in real life, there also comes a point in time when the son is set for release from the psychiatric hospital, so the father has to decide if he will let the son live with him. This review will not reveal what the father’s decision was, but the movie shows this decision.
“Papa” (which is told in non-chronological order) begins in July 2010, by showing family patriarch Nin Yuen (played by Sean Lau) on the street outside his family’s apartment building in Tsuen Wan. Nin is looking up at his apartment in shock because he can’t quite believe what he has heard. His house is a crime scene because Nin’s loving wife Yin (played Jo Koo) and extroverted 12-year-old daughter Grace (played by Lainey Hung) were found slaughtered inside the apartment. The news media have already been reporting that Nin and Yin’s 15-year-old son Ming (played by Dylan So) confessed to the crime when he called 999.
As the horror continues for Nin, the movie shows snippets of the trial and Ming living in a psychiatric hospital that treats convicted criminals. Nin is allowed to visit Ming four times a month and visits Ming on a regular basis. Helen Tam has a small supporting role as Dr. Lee, Ming’s psychiatrist. At the hospital, Ming keeps mostly to himself, but he strikes up a friendly acquaintance with an elderly man maned Uncle Kim (played by Tai Bo), a fellow patient who is in the facility for murdering his wife.
Nin has memories triggered every time he sees something that reminds him of when Yin and Grace were alive. Nin’s flashbacks go all the way back to the 1990s, when he and Yin met, began dating, and fell in love. On their first date, they went to a karaoke bar. After they got married, Nin worked as a chicken butcher. He then owned and operated a cha chaan teng (a Chinese word for a Hong Kong-styled diner or cafe), which was open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Yin and Nin took turns working at the cha chaan teng in 12-hour shifts.
“Papa” shows small slices of life indicating that this tight-knit family was happy for many years. Grace found a stray calico kitten whom she named Carnation, who became the family’s beloved pet. After Carnation became an adult, Nin remembers how Grace lost interest in Carnation, and Ming became the person in the household who ended up taking care of Carnation the most. Carnation is Nin’s only companion at home after the murders.
Nin’s memories of his life before Ming and Grace reached adolescence are all very blissful. It’s the movie’s way of showing how people dealing with a traumatic event tend to selectively remember only the good things that happened before the traumatic event. The cast members who portray Ming at various stages of his life are Travis Choi (Ming at 2 years old); Yeung Taz Hong Cayson (Ming at 5 years old); and Edan Lui (Ming as an adult). Tsang Sin Tung has the role of Grace at 2 years old.
Ming had always been a quiet and obedient child. But as he grew older and approached adolescence, he seemed withdrawn and troubled. Nin thought it had to do with Ming being a loner and bullied by other students a school. Nin found out much too late that Ming had thoughts that were much more disturbing than what the family had ever imagined.
Nin also understandably feels guilt in wondering if he could’ve done anything differently to prevent this tragedy. He has painful memories of Ming complaining that he wished that Nin and Yin could spend more time with Ming at home. A scene in the movie shows that Nin brought up the idea to Yin to reduce the open-for-business hours for the cha chaan teng, but Yin said they should wait until Ming and Grace get older. After the murders, Nin sold the cha chaan teng to a loyal employee named Salty (played by Yeung Wai Lun) and eventually moved to another apartment.
Ming developed in interest in photography and asked Nin if he could have a smartphone. Nin refused this request and gave Ming a digital camera instead. It was a gift that Ming rejected. This digital camera became a symbol of how Ming and Nin had begun to start growing apart. Ming worked part time at the cha chaan teng, where Nin and Ming sometimes clashed over the rigid ways that Nin expected Ming to do the work.
Nin has male friends who try to cheer him up, but Nin remains lost in an emotional fog of grief. Nowhere is this detachment more evident than in a scene where Nin and his friends are at a nightclub. Nin’s friends are enjoying the amorous attentions of younger women in a back room. Nin is the only person in the group who seems completely disinterested in being social. And even though Nin is not alone, he looks very lonely.
Nin isn’t completely removed from his emotions though. There’s a scene that won’t be fully described here but it’s enough to say that Nin has a sobbing meltdown after someone cheats him out of his money. His outpouring of sadness isn’t really about the money but about losing a chance to connect with someone who had promised to spend time with Nin.
Due to the movie’s creative direction and film editing, the narrative structure of “Papa” is like artfully made pieces of a puzzle that are offered out of sequence, and it’s up to the viewers to piece everything together. Ding Ke’s musical score for “Papa” is also quite effective at stirring up emotions. The acting from Lau is superb as grieving father Nin, while So gives a very memorable performance as a teenager who suffers in silence when he begins to feel like he’s losing his grip on sanity.
“Papa” has many sad moments of family heartbreak balanced with uplifting moments of family love. Without being preachy, the movie shows that it’s okay for people to have different ways to grieve, with recovery often being a rough experience with stops and starts. “Papa” serves as a thoughtful reminder about not taking loved ones for granted and giving parents the grace to not have all the answers to life’s problems.
Illume Films released “Papa” in select U.S. cinemas on March 14, 2025. The movie was released in Hong Kong on December 5, 2024.
Pictured clockwise, from left to right: Dustin Nguyen, Phi Vũ, Dali Benssalah and Hiệp Trần Nghĩa in “The Accidental Getaway Driver” (Photo by Ron Batzdorff/Utopia)
Culture Representation: Taking place in Orange County, California, the dramatic film “The Accidental Getaway Driver” (based on real events) features a predominantly Asian group of people (with some white people) representing the working-class and middle-class.
Culture Clash: A taxi driver is taken hostage by three escaped prison inmates, who force him to drive them to their intended destination.
Culture Audience: “The Accidental Getaway Driver” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in watching crime dramas that have deeper meanings about human connections during a crisis.
Dustin Nguyen and Hiệp Trần Nghĩa in “The Accidental Getaway Driver” (Photo by Ron Batzdorff/Utopia)
“The Accidental Getaway Driver” sometimes suffers from tedious pacing. However, the movie still delivers effective performances and enough suspense in this drama about a taxi driver forced to transport three escaped prisoners. “The Accidental Getaway Driver” is based on a true story that happened in 2016, when three inmates broke out of Orange County Men’s Central Jail in Santa Ana, California. The real name of the taxi driver remains the same in the movie, but the names of the real inmate escapees have been changed for the movie.
Directed by Sing J. Lee, “The Accidental Getaway Driver” was co-written by Lee and Christopher Chen. “The Accidental Getaway Driver” (which is Lee’s feature-film diectorial debut) had its world premiere at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Directing prize in the U.S. Dramatic Competition. The movie takes place in Orange County, California, where “The Accidental Getaway Driver” was filmed on location.
As already revealed in the movie’s synopsis and trailer, it’s no accident that taxi driver Long Mâ (played by Hiệp Trần Nghĩa) has been forced to be the getaway driver for these fugitives. The movie doesn’t waste any time because this abduction is shown near the beginning of the film. “The Accidental Getaway Driver” is told from Long’s point of view.
Long is a divorced father who lives alone. He is at an age (his 70s) when most people are retired, but he can’t afford to retire. It’s mentioned later that Long and his ex-wife have two adult children. Long is self-employed and has his own small private taxi service, which is why there is no agency or no company that gets the unusual call that he gets on a fateful night. The only car for Long’s taxi service is his Toyota Camry.
Long gets a call for a passenger pickup to go to convenience store called ABC Market in Orange County’s Little Saigon neighborhood. At first, Long says no because he says he’s off duty and it’s too late at night. However, Long changes his mind when the caller offers to pay double the rate of what Long would normally charge. This offer turns out to be a trap.
There are three adult male passengers in this ride. Long will soon find out that these men have escaped from an Orange County jail, where they were incarcerated for various violent crimes. The fugitives have a gun, and they are going to force Long to help with their escape. It becomes apparent that Long was chosen because two out of the three fugitives are Vietnamese, and the plan is to hide out in areas that have a large Vietnamese population.
Tây Duong (played by Dustin Nguyen) is 43 years old and was incarcerated for attempted murder and firearm possession. Tây says that he has an older sister named Linda (played by Tiffany Rothman), who lives in the local area with her husband Minh (played by Vu Tran). The character of Tây is based on the real-life Bac Duong.
Edward “Eddie” Ly (played by Phi Vũ) is 20 years old and was incarcerated for attempted murder and murder. Eddie is also an alleged gang member. The character of Eddie is based on the real-life Jonathan Tieu.
As soon as Long picks up these three passengers, he notices that they are acting suspiciously when they go to ABC Market. Long sees that there are drops of blood in the back seat, where Aden and Eddie have been sitting. Tây is sitting in the front passenger seat.
When the three strangers finish their shopping and get back in the car, they are carrying shopping bags that contain items that they need while hiding as fugitives. Tây then pulls out a gun, points it at Long, and says, “You’re going to help us, okay?” Long finds out that these passengers have escaped from jail and there’s a $2,000 reward for information leading to their capture. The kidnappers refuse Long’s request to be let go.
However, there’s a glimmer of hope for Long when Tây says that they will let Long go after the kidnappers achieve their goal to drive north to go to a place where they can get fake passports. It’s explained that the kidnappers had pre-paid for fake passports from another place but got ripped off because they never got those passports. Will the kidnappers keep their promise to let Long go after the kidnappers get the passports they want?
The rest of “The Accidental Getaway Driver” shows Long’s ordeal as he is forced to stay with these kidnappers over multiple days. During this kidnapping, Long has flashback memories of different parts of his life. And an unexpected father/son type of bond forms between Long and one of the kidnappers.
Much of “The Accidental Getaway Driver” is about the pitfalls and regrets of loneliness. At one point, Long dejectedly admits to his kidnappers that no one in his life will notice if he’s missing for several days. This sobering thought makes Long re-evaluate the isolated life that he had been living when he got kidnapped.
And these kidnappers aren’t exactly friends with complete trust in each other. They just happened to be in the same jail and saw an opportunity to plan this escape together. As trust among the kidnappers begins to unravel, it becomes a question of whether or not they will stick together or have an “every man for himself” attitude.
The principal cast members of “The Accidental Getaway Driver” deliver very good performances, with Hiệp Trần Nghĩa being the obvious standout. Long knows that he’s no physical match for these younger kidnappers, so he doesn’t put up much of a fight and remains calm through most of this abduction. That doesn’t mean that Long has given up hope that he will survive this kidnapping. “The Accidental Getaway Driver” is a memorable depiction of what can happen when a surprising friendship forms among people who are supposed to be opponents in horrible circumstances.
Utopia released “The Accidental Getaway Driver” in select U.S. cinemas on February 28, 2025.
Culture Representation: The four-episode documentary series “Scamanda” (based on the 2023 podcast of the same name) features a predominantly white group of people (with a few Asians and Latin people) talking about the case of Amanda Riley, a former children’s educator from San Jose, California, who was convicted in 2022 of wire fraud for soliciting more than $100,000 in online donations, based on her lie that she had cancer.
Culture Clash: Beginning in 2010, Riley pretended she had cancer and duped hundreds of people into donating money to her, often through Christian charity efforts, and she tried to silence a TV journalist who was investigating her for this fraud.
Culture Audience: “Scamanda” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of the “Scamanda” podcast and anyone interested in high-profile fraud cases.
Nancy Moscatiello in “Scamanda” (Photo courtesy of ABC)
Based on the 2023 podcast “Scamanda,” the four-episode documentary series “Scamanda” offers more insight into the notorious case of a children’s educator in California who received donations totaling six figures by pretending that she had Hodgkins lymphoma (which affects the lymphatic system) and lung cancer. This docuseries is better than the “Scamanda” podcast because it has interviews with members of convicted scammer Amanda Riley’s blended family, including one of her stepdaughters. More investigation was needed for enablers’ involvement in the cancer fraud.
There is no director credited for the “Scamanda” documentary series, which is produced by Pilgrim Media Group, a division of Lionsgate Alternative Television, for ABC News Studios. Elizabeth Waller and Craig Pilligian serve as executive producers for Pilgrim Media Group. David Sloan is the senior executive producer and Victoria Thompson is the executive producer for ABC News Studios.
The four episodes of this documentary series tell the story in mostly chronological order:
The first episode, titled “Stage 1: Perfect Wife, Perfect Life,” details how Riley crafted an image of being the ideal wife and mother whose life was tragically changed when she was diagnosed with Stage 3 Hodgkins lymphoma, but a former friend gave valuable information to an investigation that would lead to Riley’s downfall.
The second episode, titled “Stage 2: All About Amanda,” takes a closer look at the custody battle that Amanda Riley’s then-husband Cory Riley was having with his ex-wife, to explain what else was going on in Amanda’s life during the time that Amanda pretended to have cancer.
The third episode, titled “The Wheels of Justice,” chronicles the year leading up to police raiding Amanda and Cory’s house in 2016.
The fourth episode, titled “Catch Me If You Cancer,” shows what happened when Amanda was arrested and indicted in 2020, pleaded guilty to wire fraud in 2021, and was sentenced in 2022 to five years in prison and ordered to pay back the approximately $106,000 she got from online donations.
It’s pointed out in the documentary that Amanda could only be charged with wire fraud because that was the only way to prove an amount of money that she scammed through online donations. Amanda pled guilty to a fraud total of $106,272. She was not charged for the untold amounts that she got from cash donations or non-online gifts, because those monetary amounts were difficult to prove.
Born on June 24, 1985, Amanda Riley’s birth name was Amanda Maneri. She and her three brothers (who are not named in the documentary) were raised by their parents Peggy and Tom in San Jose, California. Amanda continued to live in the San Jose area through the time that she became an adult and committed her cancer fraud.
In 2002, Amanda was 17 years old and a school cheerleader when she was hired as a babysitter for the two daughters being raised by Cory Riley and his wife at the time: Aletta, whose has had multiple last names. Aletta has also been known as Aletta Souza and Aletta Bernal. At the time this documentary premiered, her name was Aletta Bernal.
When Cory and Aletta were married, they were raising Aletta’s daughter Jaymie (born in 1995) from Aletta’s previous marriage, as well as Cory and Aletta’s biological daughter Jessa, who was born in 2001. Jaymie was in recovery from leukemia when Amanda entered their lives. Amanda, who was later a student at San Jose State University, was eventually hired to give dance lessons to Jaymie and later Jessa when Jessa was old enough.
Amanda became a friend of the family. And she definitely got very close to Cory, who is 12 years older than Amanda. It’s unclear when Cory and Amanda started their romance, but Cory and Amanda began publicly dating a few years after his 2007 divorce from Aletta. Cory and Amanda got married in 2011.
During their marriage, Amanda worked as an educator for children in elementary school. Most of her jobs were as a teacher. But her last job before she went to prison was her highest job position: From 2017 to 2020, Amanda was the principal of Pacific Point Christian School in Gilroy, California. She resigned from the job before she was arrested. The “Scamanda” documentary series doesn’t mention what types of jobs that Cory has had.
Amanda and Cory became prominent members of the Family Community Church, a San Jose non-denominational Christian mega-church with about 5,000 congregants. Amanda became semi-famous in her community for being a public speaker about cancer. Most of the donations that Amanda received were directly or indirectly through the church’s fundraisers for her. Most of the supporters whom Amanda met in person were people who met her through Family Community Church or through Amanda’s mother Peggy, who was one of Amanda’s biggest advocates in having people donate money to Amanda.
Cory and Amanda had two children together during their marriage: son Carter was born in 2012, and son Connor was born in 2014. In October 2012, Amanda started a blog called “My Story … Our Journey,” where she claimed that she had been diagnosed with Stage 3 Hodgkins lymphoma while pregnant with Carter. She continued to publicly lie about having cancer until she pled guilty in October 2021, and admitted that everything about her having cancer was a lie.
Cory and his ex-wife Aletta had a custody battle over Jessa that got very nasty in the late 2000s to mid-2010s. Cory and Amanda wanted full custody of Jessa, but so did Aletta. According to Aletta, who is interviewed the documentary, Aletta was the victim of a smear campaign where Cory and Amanda told lies and claimed that Aletta was a neglectful and mentally unstable parent.
Aletta comments on Amanda and Cory: “She ripped apart my family. And then, they took my reputation and squashed it.” Aletta’s sister Amie Bernal and Aletta’s daughter Jaymie Bailey are also interviewed in the documentary, and they confirm what Aletta says. (In the “Scamanda” podcast, Aletta and Jessa are interviewed from Aletta’s side of the family.) Amie was the one who actually recommended that Amanda be Jaymie’s dance teacher. Amie says if she had known then what would happen, she never would’ve made that recommendation.
According to people interviewed in the documentary, Cory and Amanda told conflicting stories about Aletta. Cory and Amanda told some people that Aletta was a bad mother who continued to make their lives miserable after Aletta’s divorce from Cory. Mahasti Ameli, the couple’s babysitter at the time, says that Cory lied by telling Ameli that Jessa was born from a one-night stand with Aletta. Ameli says that she later found out that Aletta was Cory’s ex-wife, not a one-night stand. And to some of his friends, Cory didn’t mention Aletta at all and almost pretended like Aletta didn’t exist.
Aletta says that the judge in the custody case believed the lies told by Cory and Amanda in court, which resulted in Cory and Amanda getting full custody of Jessa sometime in 2009, when Jessa was about 8 years old. The couple’s former babysitter Ameli says that Amanda was the “more pushy” than Cory in the custody battle. Aletta had visitation rights but didn’t give up her fight for full custody of Jessa. The documentary doesn’t make it clear when Aletta regained full custody of Jessa, but by the time Cory and Amanda were being investigated for Amanda’s cancer stories in the mid-to-late-2010s, Jessa was a teenager and in the full custody of Aletta.
Other people interviewed in the documentary include Lisa Berry and Steve Berry, a married couple who befriended and then distanced themselves from Cory and Amanda; Rebecca Cafiero, a former friend of Amanda’s; Mahasti Ameli, a babysitter who used to work for Amanda and Cory; Jack York, who knew Cory as a kid through the Big Brother program; Josh Kierstead, a Family Community Church congregant whose father-in-law was pastor of the church; church member Vanna Ruiz and Lindsey Wilder; and other former supporters of Amanda, such as Angie Smailey, Stephanie Davis and Penny Fraley.
Also interviewed in this documentary are several people who were involved in investgations about Amanda: investigative TV producer Nancy Moscatiello, who is a producer for this “Scamanda” docuseries; “Scamanda” podcast host Charlie Webster, who is also a producer for this “Scamanda” docuseries; Jose Martinez, a detective who used to work for the San Jose Police Department; and Arlette Lee, the former IRS criminal division official who was a leader in the federal investigation of Amanda.
Other interviewees in the “Scamanda” docuseries are people who either don’t know Amanda or haven’t seen her in years: clinical and forensic neuropsychologist Dr. Judy Ho, who says she’s never met Amanda and can only speculate about her mental health; a woman named Trisha (no last name given), who says she knew Amanda since they were in sixth grade together; and Natale Tognetti and Rebecca Spencer-Wright, two parents whose children were students at Pacific Point Christian School when Amanda was the school’s principal.
Amanda faked her cancer treatments by going to hospital emergency rooms for various reasons (not for cancer), and then photographed herself in hospital beds, often showing herself hooked up to tubes or IV ports. Over the years, Amanda claimed that her cancer (which she said advanced to Stage 4) would be in remission and then come back again. She fabricated many “medical updates” for herself.
Because of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) privacy laws that forbid disclosing a patient’s medical information, Amanda’s stories that she posted on social media could never be verified by the hospitals where she went. If any medical professionals knew she was lying about having cancer, they couldn’t expose her because of HIPPA privacy laws. It’s one of the reasons why it took so long for her to be arrested and charged with this cancer fraud.
Just like many con artists who fool people over several years, Amanda is described as very charismatic and someone who is skilled at gaining people’s trust. She had never been arrested before she got into trouble for this cancer fraud. And, according to people interviewed in the documentary, any other lies she told in the past weren’t not serious enough to be considered a major crime.
The only personality flaw that people noticed about Amanda before she was exposed for this fraud was that she was extremely competitive and didn’t like to lose. As an example of her competitiveness, the documentary shows archival footage of Amanda leading a group of three pre-teen girls (including Jaymie and Jaymie’s unidentifed cousin, who is Amie Bernal’s daughter) for an uncoordinated dance routine in a talent competition at San Jose State University. The judges gave the group a mediocre score of 6.6 out of 10. Amanda wouldn’t accept the score, so she had Jayme and her cousin go over to the judges to try to convince the judges to give this dance group a higher score. This tactic didn’t work. Amanda and her group of dancers didn’t win in the talent contest.
Many of her victims say that they believed Amanda’s cancer stories because of what Amanda put on social media. They ignored obvious signs that she was lying, such as the fact that Amanda never had scar tissue in places where she supposedly had surgery or chemotherapy treatments. Amanda also never lost a lot of weight or had other known outward physical side effects of having Stage 3 or Stage 4 cancer. She sometimes shaved her head, but that’s an easy and superficial way to fake having chemotherapy.
Some of her closest supporters also thought it was strange that during the worst of Amanda’s so-called cancer treatments, they would never see her parents. Amanda explained this absence by saying that her parents were very busy. Amanda’s mother Peggy changed her stories about how much Peggy was there in person to support Amanda for the cancer treatments. At first, Peggy told people that she was by Amanda’s side for many of these medical appointments at hospitals. But then after Amanda’s lies were exposed, Peggy said that she really wasn’t with Amanda at the hospitals and was deceived by Amanda.
The “Scamanda” docuseries has archival footage of videorecorded interviews that Amanda did during the time she faked having cancer. In these interviews, she appears to be bubbly and healthy, which her supporters attributed to Amanda have a constantly positive attitude. No one likes to be scammed, so it’s understandable that her victims found it easier to believe that she was telling the truth rather than take a closer look at the illogical holes in her stories.
The documentary could have done a better job at getting more information about the family backgrounds of Amanda and Cory. Very little is told about Amanda’s and Cory’s parents. Amanda’s mother Peggy is described as someone who hated being called a grandmother and insisted that people call her “goddess.”
All that’s mentioned about Cory’s parents is that his father committed suicide when Cory was a child. Cory’s former Big Brother mentor York remembers boyhood Cory this way: “Cory was super-fun. He always had a smile on his face.” Many years later, when York knew Cory and Amanda as a couple, York says Cory treated Amanda like a trophy wife: “It was almost like how you would treat a sculpture.”
Because Amanda’s case was widely reported by the media, and because Amanda pled guilty, there’s no mystery over who is the main villain in this fraud. However, what “Scamanda” doesn’t really uncover is how much Cory knew about the scam when this scam was happening. Was he an innocent bystander or was he a willing participant in the fraud? Cory was never charged with any crimes related to this fraud. Some former supporters of Amanda also suspect Amanda’s mother Peggy of being an accomplice, but Peggy has also not been charged with any crimes related to this scam.
A caption at the end of the documentary says that Amanda declined to be interviewed for the documentary. Also not interviewed: Cory, his biological children, and any of Amanda’s biological relatives, who did not respond to requests for comment in this documentary. Amanda has not publicly stated that anyone was her accomplice in the fraud. According to an epilogue in the documentay, Amanda has issued a public denial that her parents and her brothers were involved in the cancer scam. She has taken full responsibility for the fraud, although there have been several reports that she continues to claim to have illnesses (not cancer) while she’s been in prison.
Amanda has hinted at the possible motive for this financial fraud: She told “Scamanda” podcast host Webster that most of the money that was scammed went to pay for legal fees for Cory’s divorce and the custody battle over Jessa. And considering that Cory’s employment history has been sketchy, and being a children’s educator is not a high-paying profession, that appears to be a huge motive for why Amanda went to those extreme lengths to commit financial fraud.
Amanda’s former friend Lisa Berry says in the documentary that Cory and Amanda equally lied about Amanda having cancer. According to Lisa, Amanda and Corey got to know Lisa and her husband Steve because Amanda was a friend to Lisa and Steve’s daughters. Amanda repeatedly told Lisa that Lisa physically resembled Amanda’s mother Peggy, so Amanda often described Lisa as being like a second mother to Amanda.
Lisa says Amanda and Cory first told Lisa and her husband Steve that Amanda had cancer in 2010—two years before Amanda claimed on her blog that her cancer diagnosis was in 2012. Lisa and Steve gave Amanda and Cory money to help pay for Amanda’s so-called cancer treatments. Other people in the community also gave money to Amanda and Cory for the same reasons.
Lisa also believes that Amanda got the idea for the cancer scam after Lisa had mentioned to Amanda that a community member who had cancer recently received $100,000 from a community fundraiser to help this cancer patient and his family. Lisa says that Amanda called her the next day to tell Lisa that Amanda had cancer. And then, the fundraising for Amanda began.
Lisa and Steve Berry ended their friendship with Cory and Amanda when Lisa figured out that Amanda was lying about having cancer. This moment of clarity happened when Lisa saw Amanda nimbly swimming in the Berrys’ swimming pool, right after Amanda said that Amanda came from a medical appointment where fluid was supposedly drained from Amanda’s brain. Lisa says in the documentary that’s when she knew “I wanted Cory and Amanda out of our lives.”
In 2015, Lisa saw a social media post that investigative producer Moscatiello was looking for information on people lying about having terminal illnesses. Lisa was the first person who tipped off Moscatiello about Amanda’s suspected fraud when Moscatiello began her investigation in 2015. At the time, Lisa told Moscatiello that she wanted to remain an anonymous source. But in the documentary, Lisa says she’s no longer afraid to publicly admit that she was the tipster.
Moscatiello is the true MVP in this story because it was her persistent and meticulous investigation over the years that was used as crucial evidence when law enforcement took action. The first law-enforcement agency that Moscatiello went to was the San Jose Police Department, which then referred the case to the IRS. Once it became a federal case, Amanda was on her way to getting arrested and charged with fraud.
Before that happened, Moscatiello went through a legal ordeal when Amanda and Cory tried but failed to stop Moscatiello, by suing her for harassment. Moscatiello won in that lawsuit. Moscatiello is one of the main people who was interviewed in the “Scamanda” podcast, which has more details about Amanda and Cory’s failed attempts to silence this heroic investigator.
Webster doesn’t have much to add to the “Scamanda” docuseries that she didn’t already discuss in her “Scamanda” podcast. The documentary includes archival footage of Webster meeting Amanda briefly for the first time when Webster gave her business card to Amanda after Amanda left a courthouse. Webster and Amanda began having conversations with each other shortly afterward. There’s a scene in the documentary (that’s not in the podcast) where an imprisoned Amanda calls Webster on the phone for a nearly half-hour conversation, but on the condition that Webster not record the phone call in any way.
After getting that phone call, Webster says in the documentary that Amanda told Webster that Amanda and Cory were getting divorced. Cory (who currently lives in Austin, Texas, with sons Carter and Connor) filed for divorce from Amanda in January 2024. It seems as if Jaymie doesn’t really want anything to do with Amanda or Cory because, as a cancer survivor, she feels deeply offended by this cancer scam.
It’s a sentiment of many other people interviewed in this documentary. Several of them have also been personally touched by real cancer diagnoses. Moscatiello had a sister who died from cancer. Former IRS agent Lee had a twin sister who died of cancer. Former Amanda supporters Smailey and Fraley are cancer survivors. Amanda’s former friend Cafiero had a boyfriend who died of cancer.
Family Community Church member Wilder says she felt betrayed by Amanda on a religious level. Wilder comments that before she joined the church, she was an atheist. Amanda was the first person whom Wilder seriously prayed for, according to Wilder, who adds that she still believes in Christianity, but her faith was shaken because of Amanda’s cruel deception.
The “Scamanda” documentary falters when it repeats too much of the same archival footage of Amanda, or when it uses melodramatic re-enactments with actors. It’s an overall adequate documentary that has very good interviews. However, the documentary filmmakers didn’t do much more investigating to give details of how much Amanda’s closest adult family members really knew about her fraud before she was caught. “Scamanda” is ultimately yet another cautionary tale about how people should not believe everything they see on the Internet.
Culture Representation: The documentary TV special “Who Is Luigi Mangione?” features a predominantly white group of people (with a few African Americans) talking about the case of Luigi Mangione, the wealthy American engineer who has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder and other charges related to the gun-shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City on December 2, 2024.
Culture Clash: Mangione, who was 26 when he was arrested in December 2024, has indicated that Thompson was a target because of health insurance companies’ controversial decisions to deny coverage to their customers.
Culture Audience: “Who Is Luigi Mangione?” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in coverage of this high-profile case, but this documentary offers no new information and comes across as sensationalistic and superficial.
“Who Is Luigi Mangione?” can’t even be bothered to comprehensively answer the question in the title. This low-quality documentary is just a rehash of information already told in other quickly made documentaries and news reports about Luigi Mangione. Adding to the tackiness, the documentary has an unidentified actor doing a terrible imitation of Mangione by narrating Mangione’s messages that were posted on social media.
Directed by Rhonda Schwartz and Brian Ross, “Who Is Luigi Mangione?” clocks in at just about 45 minutes, but even that is too long for the scant amount of worthwhile information in the documentary. Mangione was born on May 6, 1998, in Towson, Maryland. He came from a wealthy family and did not have a criminal record before his arrest.
By now, the basic facts of the case are widely known. A man, who law enforcement says is Mangione, was caught on surveillance video pointing a gun at and shooting UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson as 50-year-old Thompson was walking in front of the shooter outside the entrance of the New York Hilton Midtown hotel in New York City, on the morning of December 2, 2024. Thompson was in New York City for a conference with investors. The shooter fled on a bicycle.
After surveillance photos of Mangione were publicly revealed and identified him as the prime suspect, he was arrested in Altoona, Pennsylvania, on December 7, 2024. Mangione was brought back to New York City and pleaded not guilty to charges of first-degree murder, second-degree murder, criminal weapon possession and stalking. An investigation revealed that during the murder, Mangione had been in New York City and had been staying at a hostel under an alias and using a fake photo ID. At the time this documentary premiered on TV, Mangione was in a New York City jail and denied bail as he awaits his trial.
The reactions to his arrest have been very divisive. Many people have condemned Mangione as a cold-blooded killer, while others have praised him because they think he’s a hero for going after corrupt practices of health insurance companies. A disclaimer at the beginning of the documentary says that all persons are innocent until proven guilty. So far, Mangione has not given interviews since he was named as a suspect and arrested for these crimes.
“Who Is Luigi Mangione?” does what all of the other documentaries about him have already done and shows a lot of the same photos and videos of him. These Luigi Mangione documentaries give the same easily available background information on Mangione and talk about how he had a privileged life. With all the media scrutiny about his life, no media outlet so far has been able to extensively say much about his personal life except that he had health issues but he was also athletic and liked to travel and hung out with some people close to his own age during these travels.
Mangione is consistently described as someone who was outgoing, friendly and highly intelligent in his school years. He was valedictorian of the Class of 2016 at Gilman School, a private Baltimore high school for boys. In 2020, he graduated cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a bachelor of science degree in engineering for computer engineering and a master of science degree in engineering for computer and information science. Mangione relocated to Honolulu, Hawaii, after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania.
Mangione had ongoing spinal problems that got worse after he had a surfing accident in 2022 that caused him to have spondylosis, a degenerative condition of the spine. He later had spinal surgery and had other medical treatments for this condition. Because of his family’s wealth, he could afford to get the medical treatment that he needed. But according to his social media posts, Mangione was in a lot of physical pain, had episodes of “brain fog” (feeling confusion or loss of memory), and expressed deep resentment about the way insurance companies refuse to give coverage or make it difficult for people to get the health care that they need.
Mangione was never affiliated with or had UnitedHealthcare insurance, but because UnitedHealthcare is the largest health insurance company in the U.S., he apparently thought that UnitedHealthcare was the biggest villain in America’s health insurance issues. Mangione made comments on social media ranting about capitalism and how insurance companies in the U.S. care more about profits than people.
Mangione also expressed an interest in the manifestos of convicted serial killer Ted Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber, who died of rectal cancer in prison in 2023. Kaczynski was a highly educated recluse who had anti-capitalist political views that motivated Kaczynski’s murders when he targeted people to get bombs that he mailed to them. Mangione’s social media posts will no doubt be used as evidence in the prosecution’s case against Mangione.
Just like the other documentaries so far about Mangione, “Who Is Luigi Mangione?” has mostly interviews with people who’ve never met Mangione and just repeat public information about him. The few people interviewed in these documentaries who did know Mangione all make generic statements about how shocked they are about him being arrested for these crimes. By all accounts, Mangione “went off the grid” and isolated himself from June 2024 until he surfaced in New York City in December 2024. His mother reported him as a missing person in April 2024.
People interviewed in this documentary who knew Mangione are his friend R.J. Martin, who reveals nothing new; Mangione family friends Giovanna Blatterman and Joe Di Pascuale; author/social media influencer Gurwinder Bhogal, who says that he met Mangione in person because Mangione said he was a fan of Bhogal’s work; and Dorian Wright, who was Mangione’s yoga instructor in Hawaii. Bhogal comments on Mangione: “He believed that people were increasingly living automated lives.” Bhogal says he last heard from Mangione in June 2024. Blatterman comments on how Mangione has apparently changed drastically since she knew him as a kid: “It just doesn’t make sense … Something happened to his mind.”
Wright repeats the same descriptions of Mangione that others have already had. Wright also mentions that Mangione always caught the attention of women in Wright’s yoga class. The documentary has widely known information that the notoriety of this case has resulted in Mangione having numerous female admirers who seem infatuated with him because of his good looks, his wealth and now his “bad boy rebel” image. Considering all the tabloid coverage of Mangione, it’s somewhat surprising that people who dated Mangione in the past aren’t speaking out to get their moment in the spotlight.
By all accounts, Mangione did not personally know Thompson. Thompson grew up in Jewell, Iowa, and he spent most of his life living in the Midwest. Thompson, who graduated from South Hamilton High School in Jewell, was valedictorian of the graduating Class of 1993. He was also valedictorian of his graduating Class of 1997 at the University of Iowa, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration. In 2004, he joined UnitedHealthcare, which is headquartered in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. He became CEO of UnitedHealthcare in 2021.
TV journalist Dan Abrams from Law & Crime Network is an executive producer of this documentary. Abrams openly expresses disgust by the notion that Mangione deserves praise. Abrams then complains in the documentary that when he talked about this opinion on his live SiriusXM radio show, he got backlash from listeners. The documentary becomes less about answering, “Who is Luigi Mangione?,” and becomes more about what random people who don’t know him think about Mangione and the U.S. health care system.
In the documentary, Abrams sanctimoniously says that people tend to forget the murder victim in this case, but the documentary interviews only two people who say they knew Thompson. Philip Klein, a former bodyguard of Thompson, doesn’t have anything memorable to say in the documentary except that it was “the biggest mistake in the world” for Thompson not to have any security personnel with him during that fateful walk outside the New York Hilton Midtown hotel.
Kelly Wirth, who describes herself as a Thompson family friend, says she knew Thompson when he was a boy. Wirth gives the expected praise of Thompson and his family. And apparently, she hadn’t been in contact with him in decades, because she still talks about him as if her most recent memories of him are when he was a kid.
Jamie Peck, who founded the December 4th Legal Committee to raise funds for Mangione’s legal defense, says in her interview for this documentary: “I don’t think it’s possible to be the CEO of a for-profit health insurance company and not have blood on your hands.” Another interviewee who expresses contempt for UnitedHealthcare is Yolanda Wilson, a bioethics professor who says that UnitedHealthcare nearly denied her coverage for a hysterectomy and would have denied her the coverage if her doctor hadn’t advocated for her.
Wendell Potter, a former health insurance company executive (the documentary never says where he used to work) states that he was in the health insurance industry for about 20 years and has now become an outspoken critic of the industry. Dr. David Hascom, an orthopedic spine surgeon, comments on what he thinks Mangione experienced for any spine surgery, even though Hascom has never met Mangione. Another person interviewed in the documentary is criminologist Casey Jordan, who gives dramatic commentary as if she’s doing a recap for a soap opera.
The only two New York City public officials interviewed in the documentary are New York Police Department chief of detectives Joseph Kenny and New York City mayor Eric Adams. Kenny sticks to the facts and repeats information that the NYPD already released to the public and the media. He’s really the only person interviewed in the documentary who has close personal knowledge about the charges and evidence against Mangione.
Adams gets preachy and comments on all the young people who support Mangione: “We’re seeing a radicalization of our young people. We’re seeing our young people believing that the answer to a problem is by using violence. And I think it’s the wrong way to go.” Considering that Adams is dealing with his own controversies that include accusations of corruption, he might not be the best person to give lectures about ethics.
And speaking of investigations over ethics, it’s briefly mentioned in the documentary that Thompson was under investigation for illegal insider trading at the time of his death. It’s unknown if Mangione knew this information when he wrote angry rants about UnitedHealthcare because this documentary is so shoddy and ineffectual in investigative journalism. In fact, “Who Is Luigi Mangione?” is incompetent at delivering any meanfingful insight except to show viewers what it looks like for a documentary to jump on a tabloid bandwagon and have nothing interesting to add.
Investigation Discovery premiered “Who Is Luigi Mangione?” on February 17, 2025.
Culture Representation: The three-episode documentary series “Wicked Game: Devil in the Desert” features a predominantly white group of people (with a few Asians and Latin people) talking about the case of the 2012 kidnapping and brutal assault of Mary Barnes and her male roommate from their home in Newport Beach, California.
Culture Clash: The three kidnappers (led by Hossein Nayeri) beat, tortured and cut off the penis of the male roommate (whose identity is not revealed in the documentary) because the kidnappers mistakenly thought that he had about $1 million in cash hidden in California’s Mohave Desert.
Culture Audience: “Wicked Game: Devil in the Desert” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in true crime documentaries about well-known criminal cases, but this docuseries just re-uses a lot of footage that was previously filmed for a March 2020 episode of the ABC newsmagazine series “20/20.”
A 2013 photo of Hossein Nayeri (center) in “Wicked Game: Devil in the Desert” (Photo courtesy of ABC News Studios/Hulu)
“Wicked Game: Devil in the Desert” is just a repackaged “20/20” episode that originally aired in March 2020, with expanded and updated commentary from law enforcement officials and attorneys. This is a very lazy documentary. ABC News Studios produces “20/20” and several other news programs and documentaries. Many of the documentaries from ABC News Studios are labeled as original Hulu documentaries because they premiere first on Hulu in the United States. (Outside the U.S., many Hulu programs premiere first on the Disney+ streaming service.) ABC, Hulu and Disney+ are all owned by Disney.
There is no credited director for “Wicked Game: Devil in the Desert,” but David Sloan is listed as the documentary’s senior executive producer. On the surface, “Wicked Game: Devil in the Desert” might seem to be a Hulu original documentary, but the majority of the documentary’s content actually isn’t original because so much it previously aired on or was originally filmed for “20/20” in the show’s Season 42, Episode 21, titled “Catch Me If You Can,” which premiered on March 13, 2020. The previously filmed interviews were conducted in 2019, and are labeled as such in this repackaged documentary that was released in 2025.
The only “new” content includes interviews with two former district attorneys who were involved with the case; the former police detective who was the lead investigator of the case; two defense attorneys; and the “20/20” correspondent who originally reported on the case. All of them give hindsight comments that don’t add anything noteworthy. It’s not a complete “bait and switch” documentary, but there needed to be more transparency that “Wicked Game: Devil in the Desert” is really an expanded version of a previously aired “20/20” episode. For example, there could have been caption for the 2019 footage that says, “Previously filmed for ’20/20,’ in 2019,” instead of just putting the year that the footage was filmed.
“Wicked Game: Devil in the Desert” has three episodes that tell the story in mostly chronological order. Episode 1, titled “Treasure Hunt,” describes the home invasion and kidnapping. Episode 2, titled “Cat-and-Mouse Trap,” is about the police investigation that included a sting operation where the wife of the kidnapping ringleader cooperated with law enforcement to gather evidence and get him arrested. Episode 3, titled “Weed and Bananas,” has details of the arrest, escape from jail and eventual trial of the mastermind kidnapper.
“Wicked Game: Devil in the Desert” begins by showing Matt Murphy surfing in Orange County, California. Murphy is a former senior district attorney for Orange County and is a familiar face to people who watch a lot of true crime TV shows because he’s been interviewed on many of these shows. Murphy says in a voiceover that the Orange County city of Newport Beach is “like a Beverly Hills by the sea. But it’s also the type of place where people go to steal and sometimes hurt people to get money.” Murphy adds, “When it comes to wanton cruelty, I’ve seen some really bad things, but I’ve never seen anything like this.”
The cruelty that Murphy is talking about is a home invasion/brutal kidnapping that took place on the night of October 2, 2012. Mary Barnes, originally from New York, had moved to Newport Beach from Florida just a few days earlier to live with William “Bill” Bannon, who was her boyfriend at the time. Bannon shared the four-bedroom Newport Beach house with a roommate, who is only identified in the documentary as Michael S., who worked as a legal marijuana dispensary owner. In 2012, marijuana in California was only legal for medicinal purposes.
Bannon was away on a business trip when the home invasion happened, but Barnes and Michael were at the house. Michael, who was 28 years old at the time and described as a friendly guy, was the real target of the masked kidnappers. Michael and Barnes were tied up with zip ties, blindfolded, and held by gunpoint by three male kidnappers, who hauled them in a white truck and drove about 140 miles east to the Mohave Desert. The documentary has a brief audio interview with Michael S., but he doesn’t reveal anything new, and it’s not clear when this interview took place.
In a 2019 interview originally filmed for “20/20,” Barnes says that the kidnappers kept demanding that Michael give kidnappers the $1 million in cash that the kidnappers said he was hiding. She said one of the kidnappers tried to disguise his identity by pretending to be a Mexican gangster. Cash and jewelry were in the house, but the kidnappers left some of it behind because they were sure that Michael had even more money stashed away in the Mohave Desert.
Michael repeatedly told the kidnappers that he didn’t have $1 million but he had about $100,000 that he could give to them in cash by the next day. He was telling the truth, but the kidnappers didn’t believe him. The kidnappers beat up Michael, kicked him, and used a blowtorch to burn him to try to force him to tell them where the money was buried. Barnes was tied up nearby, and although she couldn’t see what was happening, she could hear this vicious assault.
In the 2019 interview, Barnes remembers hearing the sound of something being cut in a back-and-forth saw direction, while a bound-and-gagged Michael yelled in pain. Barnes found out from the kidnappers had cut off Michael’s penis and had taken the penis with them. The kidnappers also covered Michael with bleach and left him bloodied and unconscious.
It’s unknown if the kidnappers thought that Michael was going to die, but they didn’t inflict this type of violence on Barnes. One of the kidnappers threw the knife and told Barnes that it was her lucky day because they weren’t going to kill her, and if she could find the knife, she could probably cut the zip ties and free herself. The kidnappers then drove off without Barnes being able to see anything about the vehicle except knowing it was a white truck.
Barnes was able to find the knife and cut the zip ties around her leg. And when she ran for help, the first person she saw in this remote area happened to be a Kern County sheriff senior deputy on patrol named Steve Williams, who is interviewed in the documentary. Michael was found bound and gagged and severely injured but still alive when other law enforcement officers and medical help arrived. Michael had no known enemies. And without a good description of the kidnappers or their vehicle, the case was at a standstill.
But then, an observant neighbor who lived near the house where the home invasion took place reported to police that she saw suspicious activity at the house on the day that the home invasion took place. The neighbor, whose name is not revealed in the documentary, said that she saw three men, wearing construction gear in a white truck, go behind the house. The men took a ladder to go into the house, but she didn’t see the men come out of the house, and she didn’t see any construction work being done. The neighbor wrote down the truck’s license plate number and gave it to police.
This clue was an extremely lucky break that investgators needed. The license plate was for a truck registered to Kyle Handley, a marijuana dealer who casually knew Michael. Handley and Michael had gone on a high-roller trip to Las Vegas in the past but had lost touch with each other. Handley saw the large amounts of cash that Michael was spending on this Las Vegas trip and assumed that Michael was a millionaire.
Handley told his longtime friend Hossein Nayeri, another low-level marijuana dealer, about Michael’s supposed wealth. Handler, Nayeri and another friend named Ryan Kevorkian then plotted to kidnap Michael to rob him of at least $1 million in cash. Keep in mind that these criminals never actually had proof that Michael had that amount of cash. They just made that assumption.
Unbeknownst to Michael, these kidnappers had Michael under secret surveillance for several weeks, by using GPS tracking on Michael’s car and by installing hidden cameras on the street outside Michael’s house. The GPS tracked Michael driving to the Mohave Desert on multiple occasions, but these trips to the desert were actually to look at land for a potential real-estate deal—not to bury cash, like the kidnappers wrongly assumed. After Handley’s house was searched with a warrant, investigators found out about this surveillance and so much more, including the fact that Nayeri was the mastermind and chief planner for this home invasion, kidnapping and botched robbery.
This review won’t rehash all the details of this case, but it’s enough to say that there were plenty of twists and turns. Nayeri fled to his native Iran after he found out there was a warrant for his arrest. Iran does not extradite people who are wanted for U.S. criminal charges. With the help of Nayeri’s then-wife Cortney Shegerian, police lured him to the Czech Republic, where he was extradited back to the United States on charges of kidnapping, torture and aggravated mayhem. Nayeri was arrested on November 7, 2013.
Shegerian admitted that she knew about the robbery plans in advance but she claims that she didn’t know that anyone was going to be harmed. In exchange for not being arrested as an accomplice, Shegerian agreed to cooperate with investigators in providing evidence and getting Nayeri arrested. At the time all of this was going on, Shegerian had graduated from law school and had plans to be an attorney.
In a 2019 interview with “20/20” that is shown in this documentary, Shegerian claims that she was an abused wife who was brainwashed, manipulated and threatened by Nayeri, who is seven years older than she is. The former couple began dating when she was 16, and they got married in 2010, when she was 24. Her parents did not approve of Nayeri. Shegerian says that Nayeri kept her estranged and isolated from her family.
“I thought I loved him,” Shegerian says in the interview about Nayeri, whom she describes as cruel and sadistic but also very charismatic and persuasive. She currently works as an employment attorney and is a partner in a law firm in Los Angeles County. After her divorce from Nayeri, she married another man in 2018.
Even while in jail awaiting his trial, Nayeri wanted to evade the charges. On January 22, 2016, 37-year-old Nayeri and two other inmates—20-year-old Jonathan Tieu and 43-year-old Bac Duong—escaped from Orange County Men’s Central Jail in Santa Ana, California. The jailbreak inmates filmed themselves escaping. Some of this footage is in the documentary. The three prison escapees were all apprehended a week later in California.
Nayeri was convicted and sentenced in 2019. His accomplices Handley and Kevorkian also received prison sentences. Kevorkian’s ex-wife Naomi Rhodus was charged as an accessory after the fact. All of their courtroom sentences won’t be revealed in this review, in case people want to find out by watching this documentary or by looking at other news reports about this case. “Wicked Game: Devil in the Desert” doesn’t mention that in March 2023, Nayeri received an additional two years and eight months to his prison sentence because of his 2016 escape from jail.
What these four criminals have in common (besides this notorious case) is that they all knew each other from when they were students at Clovis West High School in Clovis, California, which is in Fresno County, about 275 miles north of Newport Beach. “Wicked Game: Devil in the Desert” interviews two people who knew Nayeri in high school, where he was on the wrestling team: his former wrestling teammate Paris Ruiz and former Clovis West High School head wrestling coach Brad Zimmer. They both describe Nayeri as being nice, intelligent and well-spoken in high school.
Ruiz and Zimmer say that Nayeri was an Iranian immigrant who was somewhat fanatical about wrestling because Nayeri said wrestling was a massive sport in Iran. They both say that Nayeri told people that his father was a doctor who lived for a while with his wife and children in the United States, but then the father moved back to Iran for reasons that Nayeri did not disclose to many people. Ruiz and Zimmer say that they rarely saw Nayeri’s mother.
“Wicked Game: Devil in the Desert” also delves a little into Nayeri’s past as a U.S. Marine who was stationed at Camp Pendleton in California’s San Diego County. He had problems with authority, so his miltary career was short-lived. The documentary interviews his ex-girlfriend Jennifer Tindal, who dated Nayeri in the 2000s. She says that Nayeri went on a “downward spiral” after he caused the death of his best friend in a 2005 car accident where Nayeri was driving under the influence. Nayeri received a suspended sentence and a five-year probation for this crime.
Other people interviewed in the documentary are Heather Brown, former senior district attorney of Orange County, California; Ryan Peters, the former Newport Police Department detective who was part of the investigaton of the case; Lewis Rosenblum, who is Shegerian’s former attorney; Nayeri’s former defense attorneys Salvatore Ciulla and Martina Teinert; Los Angeles Times reporter Anh Do; and ABC News correspondent Matt Gutman. In 2019, Gutman’s interviewed Nayeri (before he went on trial) in the “20/20” episode about this case. Excerpts from that inteview are in the documentary.
Murphy describes Nayeri as a “psychopath” and is very open about his disgust for this convicted criminal. Gutman looks back on his interview with Nayeri and says he knew that Nayeri was trying to manipulate him the entire time. As an example of how charming Nayeri could be, his former defense attorney Teinert says she never saw the cruel side to him that many other people described. However, she tells a story about how after Nayeri complained about the lunch food in jail, she made a sandwich at home that she was going to give to him, and her husband pointed out that Nayeri was manipulating her.
“Wicked Game: Devil in the Desert” has the usual true crime documentary use of dramatic music and heightened editing to create suspense in telling the story. But even over three episodes and using a lot of previously filmed footage, this docuseries still comes across as incomplete. There is so much emphasis put on Nayeri, the documentary gives almost no information about his accomplices. For example, there’s no mention of background information for Nayeri’s accomplices, what led these accomplices to a life of crime, and what their arrests were like.
It’s made very clear that Nayeri was the mastermind. However, he didn’t commit these crimes by himself. It’s an absolute failure of this documentary not to look at the entire story and not fully acknowledge that accomplices and enablers were a big part of this case too. After a while, “Wicked Game: Devil in the Desert” looks like “The Hossein Nayeri Show,” and that emphasis is just too tacky to take.
Hulu premiered “Wicked Game: Devil in the Desert” on February 4, 2025.
Directed by Julia Willoughby Nason and Michael Gasparro
Culture Representation: The three-episode documentary series “American Murder: Gabby Petito” features an all-white group of people talking about the case of 22-year-old Gabby Petito, who was murdered in 2021, while she was on a U.S. road trip with her 23-year-old fiancé Brian Laundrie, who committed suicide and left a note admitting that he killed her.
Culture Clash: Before she was murdered, Petito had been a victim of domestic violence from Laundrie, which were problems that she hid when she documented her life on social media.
Culture Audience: “American Murder: Gabby Petito” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in true crime documentaries about well-known tragic cases of domestic violence that ends in death.
Pictured from left to right: Joe Petito, Tara Petito, Jim Schmidt and Nichole Schmidt in “American Murder: Gabby Petito” (Photo courtesy of Netflix)
“American Murder: Gabby Petito” is a comprehensive and well-researched documentary about a notorious murder/suicide case that has already gotten enormous amounts of media exposure. The participation of Gabby Petito’s parents and lessons about domestic violence give the film more resonance. Although almost all of the archival footage in “American Murder: Gabby Petito” has already been widely shown elsewhere, the documentary’s exclusive interviews are worth watching.
Directed by Julia Willoughby Nason and Michael Gasparro, “American Murder: Gabby Petito” also has previously unreleased footage and text messages from the two people at the center of this case: 22-year-old Gabrielle “Gabby” Petito and her 23-year-old fiancé Brian Laundrie. The documentary series also has interviews with a few people who knew Petito well and are speaking out for a documentary interview for the first time. Because the facts of this case have been widely reported, and it’s considered a solved case, the documentary does not present the story as a mystery but as a cautionary tale about warning signs in domestic violence that could lead to death.
Petito and Laundrie were on a road trip from their home city of North Point, Florida, to various states across the U.S., mostly to visit national parks. The trip (which began on July 2, 2021) was planned as a four-month journey that was documented on social media, mostly on Instagram. Petito was also filming parts of the trip as footage for a YouTube channel that she was launching called Nomadic Statik. She used drones for the scenic landscape footage that she wanted to include in her photos and videos.
Episode 1 of the documentary series is titled “We Bought a Van,” which chronicles the early years of Petito and Laundrie’s relationship and the beginning of their road trip. Episode 2 of the documentary series is titled “Where Is Gabby?,” which is about her disappearance and the massive media coverage that her missing-person case received and how it turned into a murder case. Episode 3 of the documentary series is titled “Burn After Reading,” which details the homicide investigation and the hunt for prime suspect Laundrie.
Petito was born on March 19, 1999, in Blue Point, New York. Her parents Joe and Nichole got divorced when she was less an a year old. Joe and Nichole would soon get married to other people. Joe Petito married his second wife Tara. Nichole married her second husband Jim Schmidt.
Joe and Nichole’s divorce was fairly amicable. Joe says in the documentary about himself and ex-wife Nichole: “We both agreed to put Gabby’s needs ahead of our own.” All four spouses raised Gabby as their own child in their blended family.
Gabby is described by several people in the documentary as an optimistic people-pleaser who liked to make people happy. She had artistic talent in drawing and photography. Starting from when she was a teenager, she liked to document her life on social media. Gabby eventually decided she wanted to be a social media influencer with a focus on having an adventurous lifestyle.
Brian Laundrie was born on November 18, 1997, in North Port, Florida. He was the youngest child of Christopher and Roberta Laundrie, who also have a daughter named Christie Laundrie. People who knew Brian describe him as a quiet loner who had a dark side. Just like Gabby, Brian liked to draw. His illustrations often had disturbing images evoking death. Brian also played guitar but didn’t have any aspirations to become a professional musician.
In fact, all the news reports and documentaries about this case do not describe Brian as having any particular career goals. That was in contrast to Gabby, whose dream job was to be a professional travel vlogger. (A vlogger is a video blogger.) She was working on making that dream a reality with this fateful 2021 road trip.
Gabby and Brian both grew up in middle-class families and graduated from Bayport-Blue Point High School in Bayport, New York, although Brian graduated a couple of years before Gabby did. He graduated in 2015, while she graduated in 2017. He didn’t want to go to college, and at one point was living in his car. Gabby was unsure if she wanted to go to college and was taking a few years off to decide while she had low-paying jobs at places such as a coffee shop and Taco Bell.
Brian and Gabby knew each other as casual friends and began dating in May 2019, when Gabby was 20 years old. By December 2019, Brian convinced Gabby to move with him to his Florida birth city of North Port, where his parents had moved back to after their time in New York state. Gabby lived with Brian and his parents at the Laundrie home in North Port. According to her mother Nichole, Gabby had no hesitation about moving to another state because Gabby was very much in love with Brian.
In July 2020, Gabby and Brian secretly got engaged (there was no engagement ring), which was an early indication of the secrets that they kept from their loved ones. Gabby’s parents found out about the engagement from other people. Gabby admitted it was true when she was confronted about it. She also told people that she and Brian didn’t set a wedding date because they were in no rush to get married.
Gabby’s parents say that Brian was always respectful to them and they saw no warning signs about him. However, two women who knew Gabby well are interviewed in the documentary and talk about Brian’s troubling side. They both say that he was manipulative and very skilled at hiding unpleasant aspects of his personality.
A woman with black hair, whose face and voice are shown but who is not identified by name, talks about how she knew Brian and Gabby pretty well when they were all in high school, but she got to know Brian first. After high school, she and a roommate invited Brian to live with them when they found out he was living out of his car, before he and Gabby started dating each other. She describes Brian as someone who had a crush on her and became fixated on her, but it didn’t escalate into anything dangerous because he began dating Gabby shortly he and this unidentified woman’s friendship fizzled out.
The unidentified woman describes an incident that took place shortly after she and Brian had built a desk together. In the desk, she found a note written by Brian where he said, “You’re either my best friend or the love of my life. I can’t tell the difference.” The woman says she only thought of Brian as being like a brother to her, so this note made her feel uncomfortable. Once he figured out that she didn’t want to be more than friends with him, she says that her relationship with Brian was never the same. They drifted apart, and he then began dating Gabby.
Rose Davis was a close friend of Gabby’s in Florida. Davis also worked with Gabby at a local Taco Bell. Davis describes Brian as being very clingy and possessive of Gabby, who often blamed herself if she and Brian had an argument. Davis recounts an incident when she and Gabby were supposed to meet up to go line dancing at a nightclub, but Gabby was about 90 minutes late. Gabby texted Davis to apologize and tell her that she was late because Gabby and Brian were arguing and he had deliberately hidden the driver’s license she needed to drive and gain admission to the nightclub.
Davis also says that Brian would constantly insult Gabby for working at Taco Bell and because Gabby liked to hang out with her Taco Bell co-workers. According to Davis, Brian thought it was “stupid” for Gabby to want to be a professional vlogger. No one really comes right out and says it in the documentary, but Brian wasn’t any great prize himself, even though he gave a lot criticism to Gabby about what she was doing with her life. The reality was that Brian was living with his parents and seemed to be frequently unemployed.
There was also tension in the Laundrie home in Florida when Gabby lived there. At first, Gabby’s mother Nichole says that Brian’s mother Roberta treated Gabby like her own daughter. But eventually, Roberta seemed to be jealous of Gabby because of all the attention that Gabby was getting from Brian, according to Nichole. Gabby’s mother says that Gabby once described how at a Laundrie family dinner, Roberta had a meltdown because no one was talking about Roberta and her homemade pie, because Roberta wanted to be the center of attention.
Previously unreleased text messages between Brian and Gabby show that Roberta would get angry about something and Gabby would worry about smoothing over any tensions with Roberta. Brian would then say that his mother would frequently be like that. In one of the text messages, he told Gabby that whatever Roberta was angry about, Roberta would get over it. It seems like Brian had been dealing with Roberta’s mercurial personality for a very long time, probably his whole life.
The 2012 white Ford Transit van that Gabby converted into a small camper home was a vehicle that she owned, not Brian. This is the vehicle that they used for the road trip. Brian did most of the driving. But as the documentary unfolds, and there are more indications of Brian being a control freak, you can’t help but speculate how resentful he probably felt that he was on this road trip for what he believed were Gabby’s “stupid” career goals and in a vehicle that he didn’t even own.
You’d never know that Gabby and Brian were having any serious problems if you only looked at the photos and videos that Gabby posted on social media during this trip. These social media posts presented an idyllic and fun road trip taken by a couple very much in love and living peacefully with each other. This facade is one of many examples of how people lie about, distort, exaggerate or give misleading information about their lives on social media, so that they can feel important and because they want other people to envy them.
Most people watching this documentary already know that the illusion of Gabby and Brian having a romantic excursion was shattered when a 911 call was made in Moab, Utah, on August 12, 2021. The caller described witnessing a man hit and slap a woman on a street before the couple drove off in a white Ford Transit van. Brian and Gabby were that couple.
When five Moab police officers (four men and one woman) caught up to Gabby and Brian shortly after this incident, they talked to Gabby and Brian for about an hour and 15 minutes. The documentary’s first scene is a clip from the police body cam footage. Gabby is seen crying and admitting that there was a physical fight, but she says she hit Brian first. She says the argument started because she was in a bad mood because Brian got the interior of the van dirty.
Brian is seen grinning and laughing a little nervously while he’s questioned separately. Brian calls Gabby “crazy” and someone who is obsessive compulsive about neatness. In their separate interviews, Brian and Gabby both say that she has anxiety. Brian keeps describing Gabby as the aggressor in the fight.
Gabby also has a visible bruise over her left eye. This bruise isn’t noticeable in the body cam fotage, but it’s very clear in a separate photo from Gabby’s phone. This photo is included in the documentary. She also clearly describes Brian grabbing her face during their fight. When a police officer asks her about the bruise, Gabby downplays it and repeats she was the one who hit Brian first.
Brian, who had mild scratches on his arm, says that if he did get physical with Gabby, it was in self-defense or to calm her down. In the end, the cops give more weight to Brian’s version of events and decide that he and Gabby should spend the night apart. The police arrange for him to stay at a hotel and escort him there, with the hotel paid for by public domestic violence funds, while Gabby is expected to spend the night wherever she parks the van and has to fend for herself.
When the body cam footage was released to the media, domestic violence victim advocates and many other people were outraged by the police officers overlooking all the indications that Gabby, not Brian, was the real victim. For starters, she had a much more serious injury than Brian. Second, domestic violence victims often blame themselves and try to protect their abuser. Third, if police are called to the crime scene, the abuse victim often lies about the incident if the abuser is nearby because the victim doesn’t want worse retaliation from the abuser after the police leave.
One of the most unsettling things about the body cam footage is that one of the cops expresses uncertainty about how to handle this incident because he says if the police don’t take these incidents seriously enough, domestic abuse victims often end up dead. Sadly, that’s exactly what happened to Gabby, who was murdered less than three weeks after this domestic violence incident. She was last seen in public on August 27, 2021, and it’s believed that Brian murdered her before the end of that month.
One of the most compelling interviews in “American Murder: Gabby Petito” is with the boyfriend that Gabby had before she began dating Brian. In the documentary, this ex-boyfriend is identified only by his first name: Jackson, who says that Gabby was his first love, but they broke up because their relationship happened at a time that “wasn’t the right time for us.”
Jackson remembers that when he and Gabby were a couple, they talked about taking the type of road trip that she was on with Brian. Jackson says that when he found out that Gabby and Brian were taking this road trip, he was very surprised at first but was ultimately very happy for her because he knew this road trip was a big dream of hers. Jackson and Gabby had drifted apart after their breakup and hadn’t been in touch with each other for a long time.
But that changed when, days before Gabby went missing, she contacted Jackson out of the blue. They talked on the phone and caught up with each other’s lives. Jackson says that Gabby admitted to him that she and Brian were having problems, but she didn’t give too many details. The last conversation that Gabby had with Jackson, she told Jackson she had a plan to leave Brian and she was going to break up with Brian in the near future.
On August 27, 2021, Jackson says he received a text from Gabby but he didn’t reply because he was busy. Jackson comments in the documentary that he believe this text was “a cry for help,” and he says he expresses remorse that he didn’t do more to help her. However, based on what many other people say in the documentary, Gabby hid a lot of her problems from her parents and other loved ones. It’s unknown how much Gabby would have told Jackson about her plan to leave Brian.
As many domestic violence experts can tell you, a victim of domestic abuse is most likely to be killed by the abuser when the abuser finds out that the victim is leaving the abuser for good. Although it will probably never be known for certain what caused Brian to kill Gabby, if what Jackson is saying is true, it’s very possible that Gabby could have been killed if she tried to end her relationship with Brian. She never disclosed explicit details of this plan to anyone, such as where she wanted live after she broke up with him.
The documentary chronicles other well-known facts of the case, such as:
Brian returned to his parents’ home without Gabby on September 1, 2021. He was driving her van and told his parents that he and Gabby had an argument, and he left her at a hotel. (In his suicide note, Brian confessed that was a lie.) Brian and his parents refused to cooperate with law enforcement and hired an attorney after a missing-person report was filed for Gabby on September 11, 2021.
Gabby’s missing-person case exploded on social media and was big news in mainstream media around the world. And then, Brian went missing. His parents reported him missing on September 17, 2021.
Gabby’s remains were found at Spread Creek Dispersed Camping area in Teton County, Wyoming, on September 19, 2021, but law enforcement authorities believe she was murdered sometime between August 27 and August 30, 2021. Her death was ruled a homicide by blunt-force injuries to the head and neck, with manual strangulation.
On September 21, 2021, an arrest warrant was issued for Brian, who had been staying at his parents’ house before he disappeared. Hs parents helped authorities in the search in early October 2021. Most of the search was in Sarasota County, Florida, at Mabry Carlton Reserve and at the nearby Myakkahatchee Creek Environmental Park.
Brian was never apprehended. His skeletal remains were found at Myakkahatchee Creek Environmental Park on October 20, 2021. The official cause of death was suicide by a gunshot to the head.
Before Brian’s body was found, his parents discovered Brian’s journal and other belongings in a waterproof bag when they helped authorities search for him in Sarasota County in early October 2021. The contents of the journal were not made public until January 2022, when the FBI officially confirmed that he confessed in the journal that he had killed Gabby. In his confession, Brian claimed that Gabby had injured herself in an accident, and he wanted to put her out of her misery.
There’s been a lot of speculation about what Brian’s parents knew about Gabby’s death before her body was found and if Brian’s parents helped him cover up her murder. At the time this documentary was made, Brian’s parents have declined all requests for interviews. However, the documentary includes a mention of the widely reported hand-written note that Brian’s mother Roberta wrote after Gabby disappeared. The note, which was found in the FBI’s search of the Laundrie house, said in part: “If you need to dispose of a body, I will show up with a shovel and body bags.” She also said in the note: “Burn after reading.”
The documentary’s epilogue mentions that Gabby’s parents filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Brian’s parents in 2022, and the case was settled in 2024. The documentary does not mention that Gabby’s parents filed a separate wrongful death lawsuit against the Moab Police Department in 2022, but that case was dismissed in 2024. As of this writing, Gabby’s parents are appealing this lawsuit dismissal and do not discuss their lawsuits in their documentary interviews.
Other people interviewed in “American Murder: Gabby Petito” include FBI special agent (Tampa division) Loretta Bush; Teton County sheriff Matt Carr; North Port Police Department public information officer Josh Taylor, an FBI special agent (Denver division) identified only as Kyle; Norma Jean Jalovec, a Wyoming resident who gave Brian a ride to a campsite, not knowing that he was going to be known as a murder suspect; married couple Jenn Bethune and Kyle Bethune, the van life vloggers who had video footage of Gabby’s van during the time she was reported missing; and T.J. Schmidt, Gabby’s younger brother.
“American Murder: Gabby Petito” gives a brief mention of how Gabby’s murder case was disproportionately covered by the media, compared to the numerous missing people of color whose cases never get reported by the media. Gabby’s father Joe said that he used to be offended by the notion that Gabby’s case got special treatment because she was white until he saw the proven facts about the media giving preference to white females for missing person coverage, and he accepted that it was true. Joe says he and Gabby’s other parents have made it their mission with the Gabby Petito Foundation to get fair and accurate media coverage for missing people of any race.
Gabby’s parents and stepparents also did interviews for the 2021 Peacock documentary “The Murder of Gabby Petito: Truth, Lies and Social Media,” which did not have interviews with any law enforcement officials involved in the case and focused more on the media coverage by interviewing several journalists and social media influencers. By contrast, “American Murder: Gabby Petito” doesn’t have any interviews with journalists. “American Murder: Gabby Petito” also has the benefit of more information that has become available since this tragedy took place in 2021.
“American Murder: Gabby Petito” has excerpts from Gabby’s personal journals, letters, text messages and social media posts that are read by an artificial-intelligence-generated voice made to sound like Gabby. This A.I. content, which is disclosed in the documentary, was approved by Gabby’s parents, and it’s only a very small part of this documentary, which tells Gabby’s story in a respectful manner. If anything can be learned from this documentary, it’s how people can better help each other out of abusive situations, and living your best life authentically is much more important than what’s shown on social media.
Netflix premiered “American Murder: Gabby Petito” on February 17, 2025.
